Soliman’s legacy: What Mozart has to teach us about race in musical theatre

Abstract

This article serves to describe and activate conversations about racial representation in the musical theatre by expanding the musical theatre’s traditional boundaries to include Mozart, his operas and his collaborations as origins of the genre. By examining in particular the exemplary and understudied life of Angelo Soliman, the Enlightenment’s views on race come into sharp focus, raising the questions: how deep is the gap between fetishization and fascination ‐ and what can theatre practitioners learn from Mozart’s history?